In the days after Seung Hui Cho shot and killed 32 classmates and staff at Virginia Tech, Alberta Darling, a state senator in Wisconsin, wondered whether her own state's laws would have averted such a tragedy.

Records of Cho's involuntary commitment to outpatient treatment never made it from the state to a federal database that would have alerted a firearms dealer to halt his gun purchase.

Darling says she found a similar disconnect in Wisconsin: The courts did not send records to the national gun-check database.

"It was very disconcerting to me that we had a gap in our law," says Darling, who has proposed legislation to fix the problem. "We have to protect our society from people who are not capable of having a gun. It's shocking to think we could have the same thing happen in Wisconsin."

Federally licensed gun dealers must consult the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) before selling a gun. The database includes felons, fugitives and people found by a court to be mentally ill. Much of the information in NICS comes from state court systems, but federal law cannot order states to submit records.

The FBI hopes a new federal law will prod states to participate. The law, which President Bush signed Jan. 8, will offer grants to help states set up systems to submit names of their mentally ill residents to the federal database. States that don't may lose federal crime-fighting money.

In its eight years of operation, the NICS has processed more than 75 million background checks, former assistant attorney general Rachel Brand told Congress in May. The background checks have denied guns to about 1.1 million people, she said.

Of the 32 states that contribute records to the mental health component, seven have each submitted just one, and 16 have each contributed fewer than 50, according to the FBI. Gun control groups such as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence say the database should have at least 2 million records.

McCarthy sponsored federal legislation in 2002 after a priest and his parishioner in her district were killed by a mentally ill person who bought a gun legally. At that time, most states did not submit records to the national database. Some lacked the money and staff to compile and transmit the records. Others were hampered by privacy laws or decentralized systems that kept records local, she says.

McCarthy's bill gained momentum after Virginia Tech. "It's a shame that tragedy has to bring this information to light," she says. "No state wants to go through what Virginia went through."

The National Rifle Association ultimately supported the law. "We placed a very clear marker from the very beginning: If this legislation became a vehicle for gun control, we would oppose it and actively work to kill it," says the NRA's Andrew Arulanandam.

The law includes provisions sought by the NRA, such as requiring the government to remove all expired and incorrect records and establishing a process to restore gun rights, he says. "We never opposed the premise of keeping firearms out of the hands of criminals and dangerous people," he says.

Some states began considering new laws before the federal mandate.

Florida began submitting its records a year ago after a change in state law. It has sent 9,674 records, says Kristen Perezluha, spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

A new law took effect in Arkansas in July, after the state worked with an FBI liaison to set up a system.

Obstacles to disclosure

Other states, including Wisconsin, have run into resistance from gun rights advocates and associations representing the mentally ill. They say the laws invade privacy and take gun rights away from people who are not violent.

Psychiatrists and advocates for the mentally ill fear that people will avoid treatment if they think they will be listed in a government database, says Paul Appelbaum, who chairs the council on psychiatry and law at the American Psychiatric Association.

The law also singles out the mentally ill for special treatment even though people with serious mental disorders are responsible for only a tiny percentage of violence committed in the country, he says.

"After Virginia Tech, it became easy to focus on a stigmatized group, a group without political power, to pretend we were doing something about reducing violence," Appelbaum says.

The FBI responds that access to the database is limited and gun dealers are told only whether they should proceed with the sale or deny it.

"States have an opportunity here," says Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign. "Governors need to say here's who's in charge and get these records to the national database."

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